Go Behind the Scenes of Annie Briard’s ‘Within the Eclipse’

A new video takes viewers behind the scenes of Within the Eclipse, the recent solo exhibition of works by artist and ECU faculty member Annie Briard (MFA 2013).

The video, an edition of the ongoing BAF Insights series from Vancouver non-profit Burrard Arts Foundation, tracks Annie’s reflections on her practice, and on the works she created for Within the Eclipse.

“I’ve always been really fascinated by vision; it’s always instilled a sense of wonder in me,” she says. “I have very, very vivid memories of certain visual encounters or visual sensations that I’ve had throughout my life. And so, that’s something that I’m constantly eager to better understand, and to see if there’s a way that I can create work that will instill that same sense of affect and wonder about how we see the world, for my viewers.”

The works in Within the Eclipse, which include The Light of Two-Thousand Moons and Sun Simulation, were created and exhibited as part of the BAF Residency Program. The program annually provides six artists with tailored support, including studio space, resources such as a materials budget and an honorarium, and connections to the Vancouver artistic community including possible mentors, buyers, and dealers. An exhibition in the BAF gallery follows each residency, which typically lasts ten weeks.

In The Light of Two-Thousand Moons, three projectors beam coloured circles to converge in shifting colours on the wall. Each projector contains a carousel of slides, with each slide displaying a different coloured circle. The circle images were created by Annie by photographing cinema gels against the sky.

As the carousels march their slides across the glowing lenses, their intersecting rays create an “almost infinite new number of colours,” Annie says.

As with The Light of Two-Thousand Moons, Sun Simulations advances Annie’s exploration of light and colour by “distilling the elements of visual perception,” and looking them in a “pure and unencumbered way.”

Annie says she hopes the works in Within the Eclipse “highlight some of the fallacies … behind our sense of a vision and visual perception, and to maybe bring people a little bit more closely attuned to that so that we can shift or extend the ways in which we communicate with one another.”

Learn more about Within the Eclipse and about the BAF Residency Program at burrardarts.org.